here are some of the results, the first one is using my favourite jelly video that i break out at every occasion.

ribbon jelly from julaps on Vimeo.

this one was using a vj loop of space invaders, strong primary colours and you can see how it creates a completely different texture.

ribbon invaders from julaps on Vimeo.

thought id also share the source and really like to hear from you if you do something cool with it. ive exported the source straight out of eclipse which is my IDE of choice for working with processing, so it might take a few minutes to copy and paste it into the processing IDE but its pretty straight forward.
im also using toxi’s awesome geomutils library which you’ll need to run the sketch.

wordpress on the iphone. blogging in real-time?
now there is an idea… an idea which really appeals to me and i think can have some great implications.
if you’ve seen “before sunrise”, a film by richard linklater, you might remember a scene where a street poet writes a love poem for a passing couple. he writes his impromptu words right there and then, inspired by the moment. its a nice idea to share your thoughts in the moment, something striking that resonates with some kind of potency and now being able to transfer it into the digital realm.
ive started a little project doing just that, a kind of social commentary / poetry / random thoughts, accompanied by images. everything is generated live using the iphone with no post editing.
http://www.julapy.com/words/
be interesting to see where this one goes…

but what if you wanted to create a bespoke interface, something tangible and intuitive like a lever, a pulley rope or a valve to control what is happening on the screen. well then, you are now transcending into a strange world of resistors, currents, breadboards and smells of burning solder. luckily the folks behind the arduino microcontroller have made these electronic baby steps much easier and enjoyable.

a couple weeks ago i took part in a arduino workshop set up by little bird electronics here in sydney and set myself a very modest goal of changing something on screen using this little chip. i was ecstatic at the ease of use of the arduino board and within an hour i was twisting a variable resistor and changing colors in a processing sketch. mission accomplished! even though this is equivalent to a ‘hello world’ exercise in programming, it was still very gratifying to bridge these two worlds together and knowing i can apply this board to any future interactive projects.

here is a great example of work done by theodore watson ( muonics ) for a michel gondry exhibition. check out how a rope is used to open an close the characters eyelids.

over the last couple weeks I’ve been experimenting with slit-scanning, a technique which works on exposing different times of a video in the one frame, making it possible to glimpse into the past and future of the video. the above is an audio reactive piece ive built in processing where the video becomes temporally distorted by the audio. i didn’t want to get carried away ( as i often do ) so i limited the effects only to slit-scanning.

decomposing time from julaps on Vimeo.

in this sketch time moves across in a sine wave, exposing the past and present of the video in a smooth, undulating motion. the original video is of a mushroom decomposing, slowly decaying over time. by applying the temporal distortion the mushroom looks more like it is being blown away by an explosion of sorts. i can see many ways this technique could be used to create special effects in video, first by recording a time-lapse of something growing, expanding, decaying, disappearing etc, and then applying some form of time distortion to create the final effect.

here is the source for this sketch, its all pretty straight forward but churns out some nice results.
please note, you have set maximum available memory to 1024 in processing -> preferences.

temporal vortex from julaps on Vimeo.

the technique can be extended to change the video image on a per pixel basis. the temporal vortex sketch creates a hole in the video which allows to see into the future as it pours out into the present. there really is no limit on the types of distortion and final output you can create.

flong writes a great paper on the history of the technique.

been doing some experiments with QR (Quick Response) codes at work which are basically 2D bar codes and vaguely resemble conway’s game of life. they are convenient. take a snap of them with your mobile and the code is decrypted to something meaningful like a sentence, a link or even a clue to a treasure hunt… a great way of transmitting small amounts of data from the physical to the digital.

aesthetically the codes remind me of tile art, remnants of space invaders and have a certain binary beauty about them. i also like the idea of some meaning emerging from an encrypted message thats open to the public but only in reach to those that know what to do with it. and on a complete tangent, its what id imagine the robot army would be posting up over city walls if they ever took over the world, proclaiming that the humans are dead.

so ive decided to revisit the days of the throw-ups, sticking up your little piece of art on the back of street signs with the hope that someone has a chuckle. might as well make the most of this novel technology before it explodes commercially.

generate your code here.

good thing about this approach is that you are not limiting yourself to any particular sound library. ive used ESS and Minim in the past and each one gives you back a slightly different result in the fft data. in this particular case i used Minim because it pronounced the beat more over a wider spectrum and so it went better with the visuals.

noisefield from julaps on Vimeo.

the best feature of the software and what separates it from other vj tools is its integration of quartz composer which is a node based visual programming tool from apple. programming made easy! but it does tend to restrict you in some ways. put this feature together with your traditional video mixers and you have a pretty powerful tool on your hands.

the quartz composer patches that come with vdmx5 are pretty standard although with a little playing around and hooking them up to some waveforms you can achieve some interesting effects.

heres something ive composed using eraserhead snips. music from the new autechre album quaristice. spectrum analysis is controlling the glitch effects, the rest im inputting through a midi controller.

noisefield from julaps on Vimeo.

noisefield from julaps on Vimeo.

this is my first crack at a beat detection algorithm in flash. it works by calculating average sample energy per frame over a certain band and compares the value against the last few values stored in a buffer. if the value is larger then whats in the memory, a beat occurs. currently it supports multiple bands, so you can listen for a kick or a snare at the same time. the theory is based on this article that i found while looking at some processing examples.

ive knocked up a little example, left and right arrow keys moves the band across the spectrum, < and > keys stretch and shrink the band, up and down arrow keys increase and decrease the beat threshold. you will see two line markers jumping around, the white represents the average energy for the current frame within that band and the yellow represents the average energy in the buffer.

check out the swf here. download the source here.

as good as it is, the novelty did wear off after about a week due to the locked down nature of the device. i still took it everywhere but there was nothing new to learn or experience and it did become just another ipod. that is until last weekend…

i heard about some teenager hacking the iphone before doing his math homework but didn’t quite register the importance of this achievement until stumbling onto a clip of an iphone being used as a controller for a i3L VJ software. Basically a client app sits on the iphone/itouch transmitting data to a host app over wifi which received the data and scales it to midi messages, meaning you can use the iphone as a wireless midi controller, or effectively connect it as a controller to any application.

another very impressive example is by Masayuki Akamatsu aka.iphone experiments, check out the vid here.

i got busy looking for the hack that made it all possible and found instructions on jailbreaking your iphone, almost ridiculous how easy it is. at the moment the jailbreak works on all versions of the iphone and itouch although an update is scheduled soon which will most likely attempt to cover these hacks.

there is already a very active community of developers coming up with great apps on a daily basis. for a starting point for building your own native iphone apps, check out iphonedevdocs.com, plenty of tutorials and forum activity.